


From Childhood's Hour

by cloudofapathy



Series: Exposition on an Extraterrestrial [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cutting, Experimentation, Gen, Pre-show, healer!John Watson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/344941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudofapathy/pseuds/cloudofapathy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not magic.  Most of the (few) people who find out about it over the years want to call it magic, but it’s not.  Magic is make-believe, silly, fantastic—this is real.  Or: John has the power of healing.  See how it affects his childhood.</p>
<p>This is the first part of a John-centric AU I started ages ago for the kink meme.  I'm now in the process of revising/restructuring.  It's going to take awhile, but it will happen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Childhood's Hour

It’s not magic. Most of the (few) people who find out about it over the years want to call it magic, but it’s not. Magic is make-believe, silly, fantastic—this is real. It’s a sense like any of the others, but it is John’s favorite. It is not sight, though it has nuances to it that are almost like color. It’s not touch, though it comes strongest through his skin. It’s not hearing or tasting or smelling. Harry likes to play teacher, and when he’s very young she teaches him letters, numbers, and colors. She tries to teach him the senses, and the game ends with him throwing a screaming fit because she keeps leaving one out.

Except it’s not just a sense, because you can’t change something by sensing it. He doesn’t like being hurt, so when he gets one of his (many) scrapes or bruises, he sees (feels?), and then he moves what he feels (sees?), and the hurt goes away. Harry comes running, and calls him a baby for yelling when he hadn’t even broken the skin. When he tries to tell adults about it, they smile and tell him what a wonderful imagination he has. When he tries to tell other children, they either get confused or think he is playing a game. He stops talking about it at all very quickly.

 

When he’s six and Harry’s thirteen they spend a day at the park, like any other day, except on this day, Harry breaks her arm. It is the beginning of summer, and everything is green and busy in a way he can’t explain, because it involves the sense without a name. It makes him feel bright and lively. Harry is sulking, in a very Harry way, because there is nothing as painful in the world as spending a day in the park watching your brat of a brother. John knows, because she has told him.

He senses three small lives in one of the trees above them, and he thinks it must be a bird’s nest, but when he peers upwards he can’t see through the branches. He wants to know if he’s right, and he wants to see the baby birds, so he scrambles up the tree trunk, ignoring Harry’s shouts at him to stop it and get down. She follows up after him, muttering insults.

“John, come on,” she calls. “You’re going too high!”

“Just a little farther,” he tells her. The tree is rough and droning under his hands, a steadier counterpoint to the flashing birds. Why would he go _down_?

“God, John, would you—”

That’s when she slips. He doesn’t see her fall, but he hears her cry and the loud thump and crack when she hits the ground. He senses something else from her, like when he scraps a knee but much worse. He half slides, half falls back down the tree, and lands hard enough that he topples forward onto his knees.

One of the bones in her right arm is poking through the skin, and his stomach rolls with the pain and hurt he can sense from her. He grabs her arm just below where he can see bone, and she screams. He tries to move what he feels in her, and this is so much more wrong than a bruise or a scrape. It’s so wrong it hurts. He tries harder, and finally it moves, and his vision goes all gray.

When he can see again, he’s sprawled out in the grass at Harry’s side. He’s still clutching her arm, but the wrong (pain) is gone. He turns his head to look at her. She blinks slowly back at him. A moment later, he feels her arm move in his hand. The both look at it. The skin is smooth. There is no jagged bone, no blood.

“Oh God,” she says. “Oh God, my brother’s E.T.”

John grins at her. “Are we allowed to talk about it now?” he asks.

She blinks at him. “What?”

“The other sense, the one everyone pretends doesn’t exist,” he says. “I _know_ it’s not make-believe, I’m not _stupid_. Why aren’t we allowed to talk about it?”

She pulls away from him and sits up, crossing her legs under her. John rolls onto his back to keep watching her, wondering why she’s taking so long to answer.

“You mean what you did to my arm, don’t you?” she asks finally. “You think—you think it’s normal? Like a sense?”

“Not like the others, people will talk about the others,” he says. “But I don’t know why.”

“They didn’t understand,” she tells him slowly. Then, more confidently, “Human people don’t have a fixing-things sense. You’re like a freaky alien thing.”

“Rather be a freaky alien thing than a nasty girl thing,” he tells her. It’s not his best come-back ever, but to be fair his worldview has just shifted drastically. “But they’ll get it now, yeah? You can tell them I’m not making it up.”

“No, John,” she says immediately. “You can’t tell anybody, not even Mum and Dad.”

“Why?” he asks.

“Because normal people can’t do that, John! They’ll want to take you away and study you to find out why you can.”

He nods, hesitantly, but he doesn’t understand. Harry takes him home and puts on a movie. They watch the kids and the little alien together, until the scene when the scientists come for E.T. Harry pauses the video.

“See?” she says. “You’re different, like him. If people find out, they’ll come and take you. You don’t wanna be taken, do you?”

“I don’t wanna be different,” he tells her.

“Yes you do,” she says. “It’s a good kind of different. You can help people. Just so long as no one finds out.”

They experiment. Harry has to explain to him what that means, and she’s not really scientifically inclined, but she gets the gist across. She takes him to different places and shows him different things and people, and she asks what he senses. They try to choose words that fit. She’s the one who decides on ‘feels’ and, after consideration, declares that what he feels is ‘force’. He doesn’t make the Star Wars connection until several years later, and by then it’s firmly entrenched in his mind (much to his chagrin, later in life). They find out that it’s not just people who have force, but animals, too, and even plants. Sometimes she tries to draw what he tells her, which is kind of dumb, because you see drawings, you don’t ‘feel’ them. But some of the drawings are interesting. She enters one in an art contest at school and comes in second. He still makes his own hurts go away, and now she comes to him and he gets rid of hers, too. It’s harder to do hers than his, and he can’t do it at all if he isn’t touching her.

Not to suggest that they always get on, because that’s far from true. It’s rare that an entire day goes by without them getting in a row over something. She still thinks he’s a brat, and he still thinks she’s nasty most of the time. Their mum says they’re far too similar not to fight, their dad says they’re far too different to get on. (When he’s older, John will decide that they’re both right, but have no idea what to do about it.) But still, they are united in this, the two youngest Watsons against the world, and no matter how angry she gets, Harry never wants the scientists to come for her brother.

He gets better at the small scrapes and bruises. After awhile, they’re boring. He wants do bigger stuff, see how much he can fix. Something like when Harry broke her arm, but he doesn’t like the way she screamed when that happened, and anyway she probably won’t fall out of any more trees. He’ll have to think of something different.

One evening, while their parents are out and Harry is in her room on the phone, John nicks a knife from the kitchen. He presses it into the palm of his hand, lightly at first—a very small cut. It barely bleeds, but it stings more than he expects. He fixes it with a thought, easy. Something bigger, then. He braces himself, because he does not like pain.

Half an hour or so later, Harry calls from the kitchen, “John! What do you want to eat?”

She walks down the hall and pushes open his door without knocking (he hates that). John is standing in the middle of his room, blood covering the knife and the (now) unmarked skin of his arms and hands, trying to figure out how to get to the bathroom without getting blood everywhere and having to clean it up before their parents get home.

Harry runs forward and drops to her knees in front of him. She grabs the knife from his hand and throws it against the wall. Her hands pluck at him—his hands, his arms, shoulders, even a brief press against his forehead, leaving a bloody handprint. When she tugs at his shirt like she’s going to make him take it off, he pushes her away.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands, very pale.

“Experimenting,” he says. She’s angry, because he scared her, she must have thought he was really hurt—but that was dumb, she knows he can fix hurts.

“No. No.” Her voice is quiet, but shaking, and he doesn’t know why. It scares him. “John, you never, never ever do experiments like this. Experiments don’t hurt people.”

He blinks up at her. “But I didn’t hurt anybody else, it was just me. And I fixed it.”

“You’re people too,” she says. “You don’t hurt people, or animals either, and especially yourself, even if you can fix it. You understand me? Not ever.”

He’s never heard her like this, even when she told him about the scientists. He feels his eyes fill up and turns his back on her so she won’t see. She sighs.

“It’s alright. It’s alright, Alien.” She comes up behind him and wraps her arms around him. “Let’s just get cleaned up, yeah? It’s ok, just as long as you don’t do it again.”


End file.
